England handed ‘miserable’ World Cup verdict as bold Thomas Tuchel strategy debunked | OneFootball

The World Cup starts this week, but that still isn’t soon enough.

Because the tabloid content machine has already gone completely insane. We don’t even think the start of actual World Cup matches can save us, frankly, but it’s the only thing that has any chance at all.

At the very least, it might stop quite so many ‘stories’ emerging out of Daily Express reader polls. And at this stage, we’d take that.

Clarification of the day

Lovely work here from John Cross in the Mirror just making sure absolutely everyone knew he was just making a little joke. If there’s one thing we know about comedy, it’s that it’s always a good sign when you have to explain jokes.

Love that ‘surely’. Yeah, thanks Crossy, we got it. We didn’t actually think the successful football manager Thomas Tuchel was genuinely planning to try and start games with 14 players.

It’s the World Cup!

For no good reason, here’s a selection from the top headlines in the ‘World Cup’ section on The Sun’s website.

We really need the games to start now please. Before our resolve fails and we actually find out what happened to ‘World Cup’s hottest fan’ who mysteriously vanished after stadium camera exposed her X-rated secret.

Snub knows

We hope Pep Guardiola is feeling okay this morning after receiving this harrowing news, courtesy of the Daily Express.

Thoughts and prayers at this difficult time, Pep.

What’s gone on here then? Regular Mediawatch readers will be delighted to know this is another Daily Express story concocted entirely on the findings of a Daily Express poll, something that is therefore always absolutely guaranteed to contain record-breaking levels of common sense and viable content.

And on this occasion… it actually does contain a common-sense conclusion. Which is alarming, in a way. Express readers have concluded that Sir Alex Ferguson is the best manager in British football and that Guardiola is second.

Hard to really argue with that – and it is indeed a view shared by this esteemed organ.

Obviously, a sane and entirely uncontroversial outcome to a Daily Express poll is of absolutely no use to the Daily Express. So they’ve had to be completely weird about it.

At the most basic level, ‘snubbed’ is an incredible word to describe ‘voted second best at a thing ever’.

But they don’t stop there. This bit is just completely mental.

That… that’s not disagreeing? Even a tiny bit? If we can’t all agree that being voted second in a poll of the greatest managers in British football very much counts as ‘one of the best managers to have graced these shores’ then what even are we all doing?

Poll hacks

And talk of Daily Express polls becoming Daily Express news stories brings us inevitably to this.

Ah, that’s a shame. No point going through with the whole palaver now. Just bring them home.

We’ll cheerfully admit that this one caught Mediawatch out. Not because we thought it was actually going to be anything real or meaningful or that Tuchel and the lads really might as well fly back to save themselves the effort and embarrassment of actually playing the tournament itself now their hopes of success are so clearly over – we’ve not totally lost the run of ourselves – but because we thought it was going to be a completely different bit of ridiculousness.

What we thought this sky-falling-in headline was going to be about, you see, was New Zealand boss Darren Bazeley coming out after their game the other day and saying – entirely correctly and uncontroversially, and having carefully caveated everything with equally correct statements about how both teams approached a warm-up game in stifling heat on a dodgy pitch – that:

That would have been bad enough, because very obviously nobody could possibly think that the way England played in that game was the performance of World Cup winners; the important thing is that England were never going to even attempt to put in the performance of World Cup winners in a warm-up game in stifling heat on a dodgy pitch because that would be the behaviour of lunatics.

But no, it’s actually worse than that. Even though we were in full Daily Express poll mode, we still didn’t twig that this was just another f*cking Daily Express readers’ poll.

And that ‘miserable verdict’?

That’s… absolutely fine? If anything, we once again find ourselves so uncomfortably aligned with the Daily Express reader hivemind we’re reconsidering all manner of life choices.

While we’re fascinated by the three per cent of respondents who took the time and effort to tick the pointless if essentially only honest box of the three available (‘Don’t know’), that still leaves 13 per cent saying England will win the World Cup.

And England having a 13 per cent chance of winning this World Cup seems, if anything, a touch high. But certainly not wildly out of whack at all. It amounts, roughly, to a 7/1 chance and that is very much the kind of price you’ll find available with your favourite cheerful banter-prone high-street bookmaker.